Two Porn Companies Take ICANN and .xxx Registrar To Court
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SharkLaser writes "Two of the largest porn companies on the internet, Manwin and Digital Playground, yesterday sued both ICANN and ICM Registry, which runs the .xxx TLD, over extorting defensive registrations with ICANN's blessing. 'The complaint focuses on ICM's recently concluded "sunrise" period, during which porn companies, for about $200, could apply to own a .xxx address matching their trademark or .com domain.' Schools also felt the same way, and had to reserve domains under their name so that no porn content could be put up on them. The .xxx TLD has also previously been subject to criticism by both religious groups and adult industry, but for different reasons. Religious groups believe the .xxx TLD legitimizes pornography, while the adult industry believes it could lead to censorship."
Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Although the only real solution is to replace the TLD system altogether.
Re: (Score:3)
Instead of domain names, we could just use search engines to locate any side. No domain names at all; just IP addresses. That would make Google and the other search engines happy, but a lot of others unhappy.
Indeed, many people today are lazy. They just type a keyword or a partial company name in the address/search bar of their brower and let autocomplete resolve that to a hit. Hell, that's even easier than using locally stored bookmarks. I see that as evidence that the trend is to eventually obsolete
just another form of censorship (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:just another form of censorship (Score:5, Interesting)
I would ahve no problem if theior was an agancy that dictated those guidline and sites ahd to put them in a searchable area of the web page.
So you would have g/pg/pg13/nc17/ 18+/ No Rating
Seriously, Give me a tool to filter out unwanted site reliable.
Re:just another form of censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just another example of how
It was just a way to make a crapload of money from people that don't even want the resource, just so that they can protect their existing services. That's shitty, and they only got away with it because the target was the porn industry.
100% is a red herring (Score:4, Insightful)
Making a 100% barrier is not the point.
A certain amount of self-regulation will occur, and that will be better than the present.
The companies and schools that get excited about their names being used in the .xxx domain, well, if they get excited about such things, let them pay for the blocking move.
Internet users who see "washington.edu" and "washington-edu.xxx" in a browser that doesn't hide the TLD are going to be aware that the latter is not the former.
The .xxx domain is not the best solution theoretically possible, but I don't have any real hope that all internet users will suddenly figure out how to keep their libidos in check.
Re:just another form of censorship (Score:5, Informative)
>Seriously, Give me a tool to filter out unwanted site reliable.
Just being lazy and checking Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content-control_software [wikipedia.org]
Windows applications
Cyclope-Series (proprietary)
Green Dam Youth Escort (Mainland Chinese Government mandated software)
K9 Web Protection (proprietary, free for home use)
Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (proprietary)
NetNanny (proprietary)
SurfWatch (proprietary)
SafeSquid (proprietary, free for up to 3 users)
Windows Live Family Safety (proprietary, free)
Secure Web SmartFilter EDU, formerly known as Bess
FB Limiter (free, paid upgrade available)
[edit]
Mac applications
K9 Web Protection (proprietary, free for home use)
SurfWatch (proprietary, free for home use)
[edit]
Hardware solutions
Lightspeed Systems (hosted or hardware, for mobile or desktop)
[edit]
Web browser
[edit]
Internet Explorer
Content Advisor (After IE 6)
[edit]
Other
CleanFeed (ISP based)
ClearOS (unix/linux and ISP based)
DansGuardian (unix/linux and ISP based)
DynDNS (DNS based, with a free plan)
Mobicip (cloud-based)
OnlineFamily.Norton (cloud-based)
OpenDNS (DNS/ISP based, free for Families and Non-commercial users)
SafeSquid (unix/linux and ISP based)
Scieno Sitter (system unknown: used exclusively by Church of Scientology members under an NDA)
SmartWeb (Parental Control for Apple iPhone and iPod Touch platforms)
Websense (system unknown: notable for use by China, Yemen, and US Governments)
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the porn industry is beginning to self-regulate as it naturally discovering that booby-trap sites tend to quickly turn into financial drag
The porn industry has the means to get profit from the most unbelievable practices.
There are sites with thumbnail galleries where you click on a thumbnail to get a page with porn pictures. These are usually ads for paid porn, usually low-res versions of pictures or trailers of videos.
Now, some of those thumbnails send you to another thumbnail page. This new page sends you to yet another thumbnail page and so on, in a seemingly infinite loop. Where do they get profit from those endless loops?
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Youll note that g/pg/R etc are all industry ratings, NOT government ones-- and thats a REALLY REALLY good idea.
Ill leave it to your imagination to come up with reasons why you dont want the government classifying and regulating speech.
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Ill leave it to your imagination to come up with reasons why you dont want the government classifying and regulating speech.
As opposed to leaving corporations classifying and regulating speech?
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Re:just another form of censorship (Score:5, Funny)
Citation needed.
ICANN's Authority (Score:5, Insightful)
The $200 fee is bullshit, and clearly unfair profiteering. My tax dollars went toward the development of the Internet. Who gave ICANN the authority to require another $200 from me to register a domain name?
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That would be the US Department of Commerce, historically. ICANN has been spun off now, and officially is entirely independant of the US government. In practice it still holds considerable unofficial influence.
Re:ICANN's Authority (Score:5, Insightful)
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but wouldn't it be fair that each person could register a single site without a fee? and that fees should be applied to domains after the first?
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Yes. That would be fair.
Life isn't fair, though. If it were, things would be very boring indeed.
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Why? Then you'd have people who say "what the heck, it's free, I'll squat on one."
How do you decide who gets first pick? And which .tlds do you apply this to. And with 7 billion people, that's a lot of domains that just won't resolve to a real website, so it's a waste of infrastructure. So how is that fair? Why should someone who has 2 domains subsidize someon
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No they don't. No one is obligated to pay $200 but if you want something then you have to pay the asking price.
Re:ICANN's Authority (Score:5, Insightful)
If they were only charging a nominal fee, such as $1/year, noone would be complaining. The high fee is the extortionate part.
We sure know it doesn't reasonably cost $200 a year per domain to create and maintain the database entry, answer queries, and provide WHOIS service.
The high fee is purely opportunistic price gouging. Hurry up and buy, before we let the general public take your name.
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Again, I was replying to a poster who questioned why ANY fees are charged for ANY domain name, not the xxx .TLD in particular.
Personally, I would be lobbying to raise it to $20,000 a year. REALLY gouge. It's a tax on stupidity, and that's infinite.
Anyone who bought a .xxx .TLD to "protect their name" is just begging to get gouged as much as possible. It's the ideal sucker list.
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The fact that our legal system is so clogged it can't be used by anyone except the rich who can afford an army of lawyers to drown out anyone they don't like is itself a symptom of a much bigger problem.
We CAN rely on the courts for dealing with Trademark and Fraud issues.
The ICANN system can't really be used by anyone but the rich, either. Did you actually look into how much UDRP process costs? Hint: $5000 is the bare minimum.
To have a chance of winning a UDRP dispute, you really need a lawyer fami
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Plus the huge infrastructure required to operate the domain registries. They are an ongoing expense.
Religious groups (Score:5, Insightful)
Porn will exist on the internet whether you want it to or not. Using a .xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it.
Re:Religious groups (Score:5, Insightful)
They're just publicly obligated to speak out against it, along with all the other enjoyable things in life like smoking Marijuana and polyamory.
Re:Religious groups (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Religious groups (Score:5, Funny)
Porn doesn't hurt your neighbor in ANY WAY
Ohh, I dunno about that.
I videotaped myself whacking off in the backyard a couple of times and the neighbor got pretty pissed off. Something about how it "ruined" his view from the balcony or some other crap like that.
Other than that I agree with you. Bunch of Quakers out there.
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Compare it with drugs?
That's a load of crap.
Doing most types of drugs has some type of adverse effect, that is the main reason they are banned.
Some people like to pretend that there are adverse effects to watching porn, but there are no relevant studies on the subject.
Hell, even marijuana and other non-potent drugs have several adverse effects (alcohol is noticeably much so, it's only legal since the alternative is smuggling).
Re:Religious groups (Score:5, Insightful)
I debate with anti-porn crusaders a lot, and their standard approach is to convince themselves that pornography is some super-addictive drug-like poison that'll destroy a person's life with ease. If they can't find any actual mechanism of damage, they make one up. They'll even claim it is spiritually damaging, which has the nice advantage of being impossible to disprove. Take, for example, this quote from pressure group the Family Research Council:
"Pornography is a major threat to marriages, the family, and the society at large. It is not a private choice without public consequence. Pornography alters both sexual attitudes and behavior, undermining marriage, which in turn, undermines the stability of the entire community.
It goes on to list all manner of studies which prove pornography causes all manner of health problems, but I'm not even going to bother checking into the studies myself because I know the FRC has a long history of using worthless junk studies churned out by political pressure groups and distorting the findings even of legitimate studies. But that doesn't matter. It's the confirmation bias in action. If you tell an anti-porn crusader that 'scientific studies' show that, as the FRC puts it, 'Pornography viewing and sexual offense are inextricably linked' then they'll believe the claim without actually wanting to look at the studies.
Re:Religious groups (Score:5, Insightful)
>1. 99.9% of humans past the age of 13 have sexual urges.
-While I am sure the percentage is high you have only skewed this to your own ends.
Without sexual urges the human race would have ceased to exist. Lack of sexual urge has been mostly bred out and is seen as "not normal" by most people skilled in the sciences of biology and psychology, usually attributed to hormone imbalance and depression. He has not skewed the data. You have ignored the data all around you.
--
BMO
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Re:Religious groups (Score:5, Insightful)
Further, the vast majority of porn actresses are not being "trafficked"
Re:Religious groups (Score:5, Interesting)
Using a .xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn
You would have for that to force all porn to use an .xxx domain, which is impossible, be it only because nobody's able to define porn precisely.
Basically this "black-list" approach is ridiculous, unenforceable and ineffective, and was simply devised from the start as a rip-off. To achieve the goal that you're proposing, the simple solution was to standardize a white-list approach, where sites that don't contain porn would advertise this fact using a HTTP header for instance. Then any site breaking the rule could be quickly and effectively reported and prosecuted.
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You would have for that to force all porn to use an .xxx domain, which is impossible, be it only because nobody's able to define porn precisely.
Um, the government has *no* problem defining porn precisely enough to apply laws to it. Yes, the final decisions are made by courts, but don't delude yourself into thinking that they can't make a definition -- they can, and they have.
They certainly have little problem nailing people for child porn, for example. Or the occasional obscenity case.
Re:Religious groups (Score:5, Insightful)
So little problem, in fact, that parents have been prosecuted for innocent pictures of their naked children.
Or to put it another way: it's not as simple as you think it is.
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So little problem, in fact, that parents have been prosecuted for innocent pictures of their naked children.
Or to put it another way: it's not as simple as you think it is.
I didn't say there was a clear line -- the line is quite fuzzy.
But there's definitely a line. It's exact location is determined in courtrooms, and this location can vary from case to case, but the line is certainly there.
As for people being prosecuted, I'm aware of a few cases such as this one [go.com] -- but even this one was thrown out before going to trial. (Though being forced to register as sex offenders before being convicted? That sounds like a violation of one's rights to due process.)
But again -- my poin
Re:Religious groups (Score:4)
Simple, complicated, whatever -- the lines have been drawn.
Really it's not a line, it's a large grey band, and it's moving all the time. What was considered unacceptable in the 60's is now totally boring. But anyway, my point was not that the government will not be able to draw an arbitrary line and prosecute people according to the mood of the day. They can and they will, as you've stated, and very happily at that; they will never balk at using and showing their power. My point is simply that it will be useless in keeping porn off the non-xxx domains.
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Which government? The internet is a global entity. What constitutes porn in one country shouldn't suddenly apply universally.
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Which government? The internet is a global entity. What constitutes porn in one country shouldn't suddenly apply universally.
I would imagine that the vast majority of governments have already set their own standards about what porn is and what it isn't, and more importantly what porn is legal (if any) and what isn't.
These standards will obviously vary from country to country, but don't think that just because they may vary between countries or even within a single country or from case to case that they don't exist. They do.
I never said that anything should apply universally, or that .xxx was a good idea or a bad idea, or that it
What government (Score:3)
Not only that, but having your government decide on what's good for you, isn't considered "free". I'm assuming you live in the USA and not in the former DDR, North Korea or mainland China. Why on earth woul
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So tell me- does The Sun's Page 3 count as porn (when you can buy it without age restriction)? What about "lad's mags", which are basically a whole magazine of page 3? What about a movie with a sex scene in it? A movie which is all sex scenes (i.e. softcore porn)? Maybe just harcore porn- but what's that? Just sexual penetration? Oral sex? What about lots of explicit breast-massaging? Sadomasochism, with lots of whips and whatnot, but no conventional sex?
Different governments will have categorized which of
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Things to add to the white list approach. It is not free, it is held by government and it is age graded very young (toddler), young (primary school) to teen (high school) to business adult (safe for work), to be more effective. You pay to get reviewed and placed on the list, you pay more to self grade and be audited randomly. Of course advertisements are strictly controlled to be on the approved white list, they must be 100% truthful, have no false associations and lack any peer pressure traits.
Once you
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For Fear Of Godwinning... (Score:5, Interesting)
Porn will exist on the internet whether you want it to or not. Using a .xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it.
Jewish owned sites will exist on the internet whether you want them to or not. Using a .jew TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter Jewish sites if you don't want to see them.
Jewish owned businesses will exist in Germany whether you want them to or not. Using a Star of David badge makes it that much easier to identify and filter Jewish businesses if you don't want to use them.
Jewish people will exist in Germany whether you want them to or not. Using a Star of David badge makes it that much easier to identify and filter Jewish people if you don't want to associate with them.
That chain of thought started out as seeming pretty damn reasonable in an era when, not just Germany but the US, the UK, France, Russia, you name it, all regarded Jewish people, particularly Jewish businesses, with suspicion. Why shouldn't people have the right to choose where to do business and avoid those they find morally offensive? It's just a badge, right? How badly could it get misused?
In any environment, singling out a group you regard as morally inferior, forcing them to wear badges is generally a slippery slope.
Mix in the US government's current belief that it has the right to censor websites not just within the US but globally is their registrar is US based. Now what happens when a good [religion of your choice] president gets voted in and, pandering to his voter base, promised to disable .xxx. Now you've not only handed users the ability to easily filter their own content, you've handed politicians from a single nation the ability to globally switch off porn because they feel it's "bad."
How would America's gun lobby react if we ghettoized all gun related websites to .gun or .violence? How would our moral minority respond if we pushed all religious sites over to .religion? Of course, this being the US these days, .muslim would probably be plenty. How would the politicians supporting .xxx respond if all of their campaigning was forced to .politics and a flick of a browser switch could hide their campaigns from people? A lot more people are killed in the name of guns or of religion or of politics, a lot more lives ruined, than porn achieves. Yet the same people who support .xxx would freak over their interests being treated the same way.
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Slippery slope fallacy does not an argument make.
Re:For Fear Of Godwinning... (Score:5, Insightful)
Slippery slope fallacy does not an argument make.
The only 'slippery slope fallacy' is the laughable claim that once there's a power that the government can easily abuse... they won't abuse it.
Re:Religious groups (Score:5, Interesting)
Using a .xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it.
RFC 3675 [ietf.org] disagrees with you.
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Using a .xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it.
RFC 3675 [ietf.org] disagrees with you.
Of course, that RFC is just somebody's opinion on the matter. It's hardly the last word.
And really, the title is ".sex Considered Dangerous" -- not "A mandatory *.sex (or *.xxx) domain will not make it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it".
If all porn was forced to be on *.xxx domains by law and was not directly reachable via any other DNS tlds, then it certainly would make it that much easier to identify (though there's the risk of false positives) and filter porn if
It IS extortion (Score:5, Insightful)
Domains used to be free. Whose brother-in-law in congress gave these a-holes authority to charge money for a free service?
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The cost depends upon what services are being provided. In this case I'm guessing that it's primarily profiteering. I could imagine services that would make it worth $200 a year, such as verification that the sites are legal in whatever jurisdiction.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN#History [wikipedia.org]
Domains really couldn't truly be free forever. When the first troll arrived on the internet, dispute resolution became necessary, and that meant more employees and costs, going well beyond what a few volunteers could do with their spare time.
Re:It IS extortion (Score:5, Informative)
Domains really couldn't truly be free forever. When the first troll arrived on the internet, dispute resolution became necessary,
Nonsense... dispute resolution wasn't necessary, for 25 years during which the NIC was in operation, and the internet had broad commercial use for a long time with plenty of trolls, "dispute resolution" and ICANN and came long after the Network Solutions InterNic started charging outlandish prices for domains; the inception of ICANN was in 1998...
There was a very simple dispute resolution process.... file a lawsuit and let the courts sort it out, while preserving the rights of the parties involved. A much fairer, more proper process than what we have today.
There's a much simpler reason domains can't be free though -- the US government stopped funding the NIC, due to its commercial use - it was deemed the funding has to come from the private sector.
It's not free to run a domain registry, the money has to come from somewhere.
Ideally a non-profit organization would have formed to operate the registry for the benefit of the community; and the community of ISPs / DNS users would support that registry by utilizing it.
Guess what... that part didn't happen. Turns out there is so much money to be made running a domain registry, for-profit entities slipped in there first through their existing contracts, lots of money to be made by treating domain names as tangible items that "expire" or are "rented" at high price instead of community resources allocated to the registrant, with costs to be recovered from the community of users.
Instead of a "non-profit" central domain registry operated in a manner that bests benefits the entire community and all registrants.
We have a multitude of for-profit registries... that's the substitute answer. Instead of providing the community as a whole a single central DNS service that bests serves the community, a strange idea one out that if we have enough for-profit organizations competing, and all selling the same registry-operator service with their own markup that is remarkably similar across all registrars (with special discounts to certain orgs that register hundreds of thousands of superfluous domains), that somehow makes it "OK".
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Yeah, when 12 people wanted them and it was run by a voluneterr, domani names where free.
NO we have to pay for the service.
and 200 dollars isn't extortion. N fact, I wish all domains cost 200 dollars, with the exception of some sory of domain for personal use only. No corporation, not business.
That should be free.
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Time to stop worrying about the name at all, then. <shrug>
"sunrise fees were excessive" (Score:4, Insightful)
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but a good price to deter squatters and bulk buyer speculators.
Who says you have to buy a damn thing?
domain kiting, v., the act of registering a domain, deleting it before the 5 days grace period is up, and reregistering it. Wash, rinse, repeat.
200 bux is extortion.
--
BMO
5 days grace period? (Score:3)
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Free is infinitely less expensive than $2/year. We're talking about squatters here, who "buy" domains in the thousands without spending a penny every 4.9 days.
Domain kiting is like domain tasting, but ICANN and the other TLDs have appended a 20 cent fee to each domain taste so the "domain taste millions of names" has shrunken to a trickle.
--
BMO
Re:"sunrise fees were excessive" (Score:5, Funny)
...but a good price to deter squatters and bulk buyer speculators
I vote that we move all ecommerce and technical sites to .xxx since they do seem to have better quality control.
It seems... (Score:2)
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Considering the way many Americans treat guns, gun should be in .xxx too.
That is the next step (Score:5, Interesting)
Has EVERYONE forgotten about .mobi and .travel? There ARE already industry specific TLD's and they failed dismally. In fact, I am in the industry and when I asked at fairly high level people why .xxx was expected to go any better then .travel and .mobi it was awfully silent.
INCLUDING about the claim "well if nobody wants it the price will just drop" with the question "But you invested a fortune in lobbying so you will then just give up instead of using your bought politicians to mandate porn sites to buy an XXX domain".
Baby steps. First you register the jews, then you make them identifiable, well you know the rest. Godwin? Yes absolutely, it is not about the eradiction of undesirables BUT the .xxx domain has some very odd supporters. Lots of politicians that would dearly love to see porn gone (and freedom of expression) supported the .xxx domain. Why? I think a phase 2 might happen maybe not by design but by the business behind it who spend a fortune getting this wanting to make sure it succeeds. Again with Godwin but do you think the census takers at IBM who recorded the faith of people in Germany knew the final solution?
Anyway, ICANN has long been thinking about launching endless TLD's. Think .gun or .apple is bad? How about .paris and .washington? Each town, their own TLD, every business their own TLD.
.xxx is an experiment. Not so much about whether their is a market but how a market can be forcible created.
A lot of people think they can get .xxx to work for them, it is sold to some porn companies as in that the .xxx domain will be more legit so they can get better deals with mainstream business for advertising... yes, they really are that stupid.
Playboy had no problem getting mainstream advertising but most porn sites are a squalid dirty mag that even the industry itself would be reluctant to advertise in.
But you can claim you read playboy.COM for the articles. Good luck doing that with playboy.xxx
For decades the industry has attempted to seem legit, that they are just a business, just like Playboy is. And now a lot of them think the best way to do that is cover their faces in the cum of the .xxx tld. Yeah, that will work. Why not wear a star and paint your face black (the only difference between Germany and the US is that you don't need to get blacks to wear anything to tell them apart. People can just tell it seems. Must be the big noses)
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If porn gets its own TLD then why don't gun companies have their own TLD extension?
Because gun companies aren't a popular internet destination. It's NOT porn companies that want a .XXX TLD extension. It is (1) a certain large company that stands to make a mint by operating the .XXX registry, and
(2) domain registrars that stand to make a mint, because they know the popularity of porn destinations, and they hope to sell a lot of domain names, both to companies who don't want someone else to us
It's Extortion (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just a racket to force many companies to pay ICANN for protection.
Unlike the uselss .biz and .co TLDs that no one care about, .xxx can be used to be actively exploit and damage the names of respected businesses and organizations.
Legitimate porn companies will probably stay away from .xxx names because it is saying that we can't afford a real TLD. It will also open themselves up to be easily censored. There is nothing advantageous to it.
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Unlike the uselss .biz and .co TLDs that no one care about, .xxx can be used to be actively exploit and damage the names of respected businesses and organizations.
This entire argument is bogus. In what way does it damage their names or reps? You really think anyone of any significance would actually believe that sears.xxx or ibm.xxx means that Sears or IBM have just started up porno services?
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I was thinking the same thing. Then I remembered my neighbours. Most people are stupid. I mean really fucking stupid.
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Companies don't own a name. They own a name PLUS a TLD. If they had some magical right to all TLDs after they have registered one would make TLDs pretty useless. And would you care to elaborate exactly how a similarly named .xxx site is going to "damage the names" of businesses? I doubt that their potential customers will be searching for services on the .xxx domain.
I am not going to explain (Score:2)
Just register microsoft.xxx, their lawyers will explain it to you, while they rip you a new one in court.
$200 is a lot (Score:2)
$5 to cover the cost of the paperwork sounds better.
The "pre-emptive block" should in no way be a moneymaker for anyone.
hmmm (Score:3)
Porn is legitimate.
the point of .xxx is censorship. mainly censorship by whoever owns the system.
And any domain with your copyright in the name will be turned over to you through normal court process. Something I don't agree with, but there you are.
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Country code TLDs only (Score:3)
Keep your children away from the Internet! (Score:3)
And thank you for not being a lazy excuse of a parent and spending your time with your kids.
It'd be so much better for both children and the Internet if they were separate from each other.
Re:Parent is Goatse (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Parent is Goatse (Score:5, Funny)
Makes sense. If I had a sense of humor, made via perl I'd inflict my misery on everyone too.
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The real issue is why ANYONE who doesn't want a xxx domain would pay $200 a year to "reserve" it - THAT looks worse - having a xxx legitimately tied to your school in the WHOIS - than having some ex-alumni registering it to post their frat party pics.
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Re:why can everyone be happy. (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean .xxx does in some sense acknowledge that people market pron.
When is the last time you paid attention to a TLD? When is the last time *anyone* paid attention to a TLD?
It also should make it MUCH easier for people who want to avoid seeing pron to not be spammed by it.
You are suggesting that all the porn providers would magically all move over to the .xxx domain by themselves, for your convenience. Gosh, you're naive and lazy.
And if you are being spammed by porn, I suggest you examine exactly which websites you are going to. I only get porn spam by visiting, you know, porn sites.
Is it censorship to not look at things I don't want to and now allow them to be seen by people using equipment I have authority over?
English, motherfucker, do you speak it?
Let me try to parse that....
Oh yeah, you can subscribe to one of the many filtering companies out there like Websense and Bluecoat. You can even set your DNS to use the filtering at OpenDNS, which is free (well, they take your demographics and such). There is no shortage of companies that will help you shield your eyes, should you want it. The fact that you are offended by stuff you see says 2 things about you: that you are thin skinned and lazy.
It seems to me .xxx meets a legitimate content labeling goal that can make everyone's life easier because we all understand what kind of 'information' should be labeled in that way and can act appropriately.
Go be a nanny somewhere else.
--
BMO
Re:why can everyone be happy. (Score:4, Informative)
Let me guess, you are an american?
Those of us outside the US pay a lot more attention to TLD's than the US does. Because the difference between .com, and .ca or .uk can be substantial.
Lets say you're making a display, and you want to call yourself 'vivid' because well, you make displays that are vivid. (Or maybe you're HTC making a phone you want to brand that way, same deal) and someone else wants to equally correctly, but in a completely different context brand themselves 'vivid'.
Maybe you are Apple Records, and this pair of jackass hacker dudes want to be Apple computer, and someone else who wants to do porn was given the unfortunate name of Apple.
TLD's are great for context, and they're great for blocking stuff at work that you don't want employees involved with. Around here makes a lot of sense to block .gov, because well, it's the wrong .gov, but search engines still spit out forms and stuff, and that doesn't do us a lot of favours. It's easier to keep it away from your employees than let them be stupid and waste hours trying to sort out paperwork for the wrong government. (This is somewhat more problematic between various commonwealth governments, which for example share a lot of department names, they're all "Her Majesties Government" on official paper work and so on, it's not so much of an issue with the US because for example, no one else spells defence defense, but I've had issues with NAFTA stuff like that were someone wasn't smart enough to do paperwork for the correct country and we had to do it over). It also gives you more variants on useful words so that you don't have just one monopolizing brand on a name, even when none of Apple Records, Apple Corp, or Apple Inc (Apple Computer) actually sell Apples, nor are they related to any person who has been unfortunately named Apple. Which I guess is an argument for more TLD's that are context sensitive. .com and .org at one point were supposed to mean different things potentially.
Re:why can everyone be happy. (Score:5, Insightful)
.com and .org at one point were supposed to mean different things potentially.
You just nailed why TLDs no longer matter. It doesn't matter any more what you or I thought TLDs are supposed to mean. They mean nothing now. They are placeholders. You are lucky if a country code TLD actually matches where the website actually originates from or is targeted to.
Which is why you should pay attention more to what it says on the front page than it says in the TLD.
someone wasn't smart enough to do paperwork for the correct country and we had to do it over
So the "Her Majesty's Government of Australia" on the top of the page did not differentiate from "Her Majesty's Government of Northern Ireland?" I don't know about you, but I find governments to be pretty possessive about their names and make sure they're plastered all over every web page, print publication, video, film, etc.
>gov meaning explicitly US government is bad.
I agree, and it's an argument why TLDs should be done away with. We should have country codes at most.
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BMO
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I think I nailed where we failed at doing the right thing with TLD's and should go back and fix that for the future. If it ends up that .com and .org end up as basically indistinguishable that's one mistake we can live with, if all of the other possible TLD's have that problem then they really are meaningless, and we should rapidly move to prevent that.
As a practical matter a lot of countries internally refer to themselves differently than outwardly. It's just Her Majesties Government, if you say it prope
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>I think I nailed where we failed at doing the right thing with TLD's and should go back and fix that for the future. If it ends up that .com and .org end up as basically indistinguishable that's one mistake we can live with, if all of the other possible TLD's have that problem then they really are meaningless, and we should rapidly move to prevent that.
Too late. The time to keep all the ducks in a row has passed and to Joe and Josephine User, it matters not, because nobody ever bothered to explain to t
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Let me guess, you are an american?
Those of us outside the US pay a lot more attention to TLD's than the US does. Because the difference between .com, and .ca or .uk can be substantial.
Well, yes. But we only differentiate between "my ccTLD" and "every other TLD". No non-techie cares about the difference between .com, .info and .mil; they will assume that domains start with "www." and end with ".de" (me being in Germany).
.de), the regional ccTLD (e.g. .eu),
If you're a private person there's only one TLD relevant to you, your local ccTLD. If you're a company then there are more relevant ccTLDs, mainly to avoid malicious websites posing as yours - but that amounts to the local ccTLD (e.g.
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That doesn't really work if you do business in english for french. Sometimes I really mean amazon.com, amazon.ca, amazon.co.uk or amazon.fr. English searches will hit me all 3 regularly (and a few others) and french searches 2 of the above.
I'm sure german has something similar, but since it's all the EU block it matters a lot less.
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When is the last time you paid attention to a TLD? When is the last time *anyone* paid attention to a TLD?
When you set your Google search preferences you will want to search in languages you understand.
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When you set your Google search preferences you will want to search in languages you understand.
That has absolutely nothing to do with TLDs.
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BMO
Re:why can everyone be happy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Who defines what is porn? Two persons on opposite sides of the planet will have very different opinions on that. That's why there's fear of censorship. It opens the way for a law to have everything deemed pornographic to be moved under the .xxx TLD, which means that the website might as well not exist from the point of view of many networks.
Re:why can everyone be happy. (Score:5, Informative)
Who defines what is porn?
This.
We have Hasidic Jews in NYC that are upset at bicyclists going through their neighborhood on a Saturday wearing shorts and teeshirts. Especially if they are women.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/08/hipsters-hasidic-jews-fig_n_384579.html [huffingtonpost.com]
And that's just the US. I just read a story about how women in Saudi Arabia, that if they have "sexy eyes" while otherwise clothed head-to-toe must also cover up their eyes, or face the beatings by the Religious Police.
http://jezebel.com/5860660/helpful-saudi-arabian-committee-suggests-women-cover-their-sexy-eyes [jezebel.com]
People don't tell control freaks and prudes to fuck-off nearly as much as they need to.
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BMO
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it where porn begins that's hard to define. I can show things that everyone would consider porn.
However, just make it part of the equal that the person buying the sight intends to us it as porn. That way the purchases will be using their definition.
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it where porn begins that's hard to define. I can show things that everyone would consider porn.
However, just make it part of the equal that the person buying the sight intends to us it as porn. That way the purchases will be using their definition.
Just because there's a vague blur between "porn" and "not porn", that doesn't mean the government can't make a definition. It can, and it has.
People do get arrested, tried and convicted for child porn, for example. Yes, the "child" part is fairly cut and dried, but the porn part requires judgement calls, and police, prosecutors, judges and juries seem to be able to make those judgement calls as needed. Yes, there is a gray area, and that's not idea, but don't pretend that people can't or won't make these
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If you're asking "Is it censorship to not look at things I don't want to?", the answer is no.
If you're asking "Is it censorship to not allow them to be seen by people using equipment I have authority over?", the answer is yes.
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But if playboy.com and playboy.xxx both exist, the filter can assume that playboy.com probably is porn.
Same with slashdot.xxx and slashdot.org.
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>CDD
I don't see how the Christ botherers are upset about Sharia Law. The Wahabbists and Dominionists want the same exact things.
I first discovered CDD from shortwave frequency preachers back in the mid 80s and it is frightening. You go to the front page of the CDD movement on the web and it seems... "okay not so bad" but then you listen to actual preachers and enthusiasts and it's like something out of the 14'th century.
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BMO
You would think so BUT? (Score:2)
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That sounds awful. Did all of the people in that class instantly turn into rapists?